Q: Your book disputes much of
the recent commentary about large gains for women in the workplace. Why do you
think two such different pictures have emerged?

A: Several reasons. One is
that people—including journalists—look at statistics and misread them. For
example, all the stories about women being “The Richer Sex” did not tell the
real story.

In 2009, Bureau of Labor
Statistics released data saying that 40 percent of women outearn their spouses.
But in fact, the only segment of society in which a substantial percent of
wives significantly outearn their husbands is low-income workers, couples whose
earnings average some $20,000 a year. This is rich?

The richer the couple, the
less likely it is that a woman will outearn her husband. (Among affluent
couples, it’s about ten percent). But the facts did not dampen the enthusiasm
for The Richer Sex stories.

As for the “end of men,” it
is based on statistics that women earn the majority of advanced degrees. But
while women are doing spectacularly well in universities, in the workplace it's
an opposite picture.

Women are stalling out, and
the higher they go, the harder it gets. Women are not making the progress they
have a right to expect, given their education and early promise. The Sloan Foundation
says it is doubtful that women will be leaders in the areas they have studied
in.

Gender discrimination has not
gone away, it has just gone underground, and derails women as they try to move
up.

Q: Your title refers to a
"soft war" against women. How would you define a soft war, and how
does it compare to earlier forms of discrimination?

A: Why do we call it soft?
Because research finds that today’s barriers are more subtle and insidious than
the old ones. It’s less a frontal assault than an ongoing and very effective
guerrilla movement. Now, bias operates under a welcoming facade; the bombs are
under the surface, but they still explode.

This isn’t an overt
conspiracy to hold women back. Instead, it’s a perfect storm of economic,
political and social factors that combine to threaten women’s progress.

Today, nobody says, “No women
need apply.” But people may say, “You’re just not as likable as he is.” And
even if he is not as good as you, he will be promoted because he is seen as
more likable. The more competent a woman is, the more she is seen as bitchy,
unfriendly, and not a good colleague.

Or, you will hear, “You women
have come far enough. Now we need to pay attention to the men.” Or, “You’ve
done great work, but I’ve got more confidence in Joe’s potential. He’s going to
be a star!” Research finds that women are promoted on performance, while men
are often promoted on promise.

If you’re a female in a top
job and you slip up in a man’s world, you’re most likely out the door. If
you’re working on a project with a man, he’ll probably get the credit you
deserve. (We heard this complaint again and again from women around the U.S.)

You and your male colleague may
both have a mentor, but he’ll get a sponsor—an advocate who will go to bat for
him in a way that a woman’s champion will not.

If you are a mother who is
serious about your work, you will be looked on as not really committed to that work,
and not very competent to boot. A man with a résumé just like yours, however,
will get a bonus for parenthood; he will be seen as serious, dedicated and
responsible.

If you speak up at some
length at work, even if you are in a senior position, you will be seen not only
as gabby but also as incompetent. A man who talks as much or more than you do
will be seen as powerful and forceful.

These attitudes—held by both
women and men—put a brake on women’s advancement.

Q: Why do you think gains for
women in the workplace have stalled, and what do you think could be done to
change that pattern?

A: Picture two people, a man
and a woman, starting out on a lifelong path of work. Both are equally
qualified, both have the same sort of dreams, and both are willing to work as
hard they can to achieve their goals.

But only one of these people,
the man, is unencumbered. The other carries a fifty-pound pack on her back. He
strides freely and swiftly. She travels much more slowly, struggling with a
burden that she can’t seem to shed.

Gender discrimination is as
heavy as a pack filled with large rocks that slows her down as she struggles to
move ahead. She has to muster a great deal of energy and resources to continue
her journey.

In spite of the extra burdens
they carry, women are making progress in reaching their goals. But it’s slow
going, and the number of women thins out as the top of the ladder comes into
view. Gender discrimination is a drag anchor for too many women.

Q: You write, "It is
both the best of times and the worst of times for women in science, technology,
engineering and math (STEM)." Why is that, and what do you see looking
ahead?

A: A 2011 U. S. Department of
Commerce report said that women are vastly underrepresented in STEM jobs and
among STEM degree holders. Although women fill close to half of all jobs in the
U. S. economy, they hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs.

The problems women have with
STEM start very early in life—in elementary school, in fact.

• In the third and fourth
grades, boys and girls like math equally.

There’s no change in fifth
and sixth grade for boys, but

girls’ preference declines.

• Between fourth and twelfth
grades, the percentage of girls who say they like science decreases from 66
percent to 48 percent.

• Also between fourth and
twelfth grades, the percentage of

girls who say they would
prefer not to study math anymore

increases from 9 percent to a
whopping 50 percent.

The issue isn’t lack of
aptitude, according to a huge study by Jonathan M. Kane and Janet E. Mertz of
the University of Wisconsin They analyzed scores from more than half a million
fourth-and eighth- graders from more than sixty countries.

Their conclusion: There were
essentially no gender difference between girls and boys in math. That’s the
good news.

But when women do opt for
STEM, there are obstacles. Women in the high-tech world too often don’t get
second chances. In such a risky business, there are plenty of failures.

When women they fail, they
sink, report the Athena Factor project, sponsored by IBM, Microsoft, Dell,
Cisco and others. Women in high positions in male-dominated fields suffer
harsher penalties than men when they slip up. Men usually get a second chance,
even when they reach high but miss the brass ring. It’s much harder for women
to take the kind of risks that catch the eye of higher-ups.

If a man fails, his buddies
dust him off and say, ‘It’s not your fault; try again next time. Women find it
extremely difficult to take these kinds of risks-- their buddy system just
isn’t strong enough to save them if they fail.

Too often a woman fails and
is never seen again.

So we need to encourage girls
when they’re in pigtails and keep on boosting them when they are trying to move
ahead in STEM fields.

Q: What are you working on
now?

A: Statistics tell us that a
baby girl born today has a very good chance of living for a century. So we are
working on “Are you ready for the hundred-year life?”

Q: Anything else we should
know?

A: Yes—that women too often
suffer from a “rose-colored glasses” syndrome. They think discrimination is
ancient history. If women buy the message that all the gender battles are over,
but they still aren’t advancing as fast as they should be, they may believe
there’s no one to blame but themselves.

What to do? Take more
courses, beef up your credentials with more degrees, work harder, join company
sponsored self- esteem-building programs and on and on.

But if the problem is subtle
discrimination, along with deeply entrenched gender stereotypes, self-
improvement will have only a limited payoff for moving ahead. If you put all
your eggs into the self-improvement basket and forgo any concerted action with
other women (or sympathetic men), your stall will be permanent. Too often, we
have met the enemy, and she is us.

Jill Vialet is the author of the new children's book Recess Rules. She is the founder and CEO of Playworks, a nonprofit organization that works with schools to improve recess for kids. She also co-founded the Museum of Children's Arts (MOCHA) in Oakland, California. She is based in Oakland.

Q: Why did you decide to write Recess Rules, and how do the
book's themes fit with your work at Playworks?

A: I actually set out to write a book for grown-ups about my
experiences starting Playworks - sort of a combination of how to guide on play
and recess and inspiration around achieving social change. But every time I sat
down to write that book, it just came out in a way that didn't feel authentic.

So I started working on this book - telling a story aimed at
kids that showed them how recess could be. It was way more fun to write
- and ultimately targeting the group that I most wanted to inspire and
move to action.

Q: How did you come up with the character of Clarence?

A: I had a playground supervisor named Clarence when I was
growing up in D.C. who always made sure I got in the game.

The character was really inspired by a number of different
Playworks coaches over the years - but it seemed like if I was going to have an
angel, naming him Clarence in honor of my own Clarence and It's A Wonderful Life was meant to be.

Q: Do you think readers will identify with one of the kids
in the book more than the others?

A: I really hope that the readers will find something in all
of the characters to identify with - I think Cassie is the most obvious
protagonist, but I found myself identifying a lot with Toni and Bryant, and
Clarence as well.

Q: What age group do you think will enjoy the book?

A: I think 8-13 - though I'm also hoping that there will be
a number of grown-ups who get into it - parents, teachers, other folks who work
with kids

Q: Are you planning to write another book?

A: No immediate plans to write another book, but I really
enjoyed writing it and I'm open to the possibility.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Just that there is a guide to all the games that are
played in the book at the very end and that I hope readers will be inspired to
give the games a try after reading about them. I'd love to hear stories
and see pictures if people do end up trying some of the games out!

A: First because the Tevye
stories, and their incarnation as Fiddler on the Roof, had such a huge impact
and seeped into the culture so deeply that they can really tell us a lot about
how culture works in society and how collective memory is created, and a lot
about the Jewish experience in the United States and beyond, and some of the
universal themes that the stories [represent].

Why personally was I drawn to it?
It has a lot to do with my own background, my scholarship in the theater, my
study of Yiddish, my love of musicals. This is so completely overdetermined for
me!

Q: What role has Fiddler on the
Roof come to play in American cultural history?

A: Fiddler on the Roof is a show
that was created by some of the greatest talents of the American musical stage
at the height of the form of the Broadway musical. It had a pretty big reach
because it was a good show.

At the same time, it turned into
folklore. It became an icon of Jewishness and of folklore generally, and a
touchstone for a lot of themes and identifications, practices and ideals that
pertain to the Jewish-American experience and more generally [to other cultures
as well].

Q: What did the play come to mean
for American Jews in the 1960s?

A: It was the first major work of
popular culture to represent the Eastern European past. Sholem-Aleichem had
been translated before, other Yiddish writers had been translated, there were
radio broadcasts in English.

But those were things people could
read or listen to in the privacy of their homes. A Broadway play is very, very
public; it’s a primary form of popular culture of the period.

It produced some anxiety for a
number of people, who were afraid it would be too Jewish, but audiences
embraced it, and it created pride in the American Jewish community.

Q: You write in the book about
other productions of Fiddler in other countries or cultures. Why is this such a
universal story?

A: It operates successfully on two
tracks. One is the Jewish track. Jews of Ashkenazi background can identify with
particular stories or practices—the Sabbath, the chuppah, other aspects of
shtetl life that people may have heard about from their grandparents. They can
feel proud of its representation.

At the same time, the story is one
that deals with generational conflicts, the impact of change, the shift from
tradition to modernity. These are absolutely universal themes.

Q: What surprised you the most in
the course of your research?

A: Tons of things surprised me!
The first thing was to learn about Sholem-Aleichem’s own desperate failure in
the Yiddish theater of the United States. He was one of the most beloved
writers of Yiddish prose; he would go on massive tours around the Pale and in
Europe. He was met by cheering throngs; his work was put in periodicals there
and in the U.S.; amateur groups would get together to do his work.

And yet when he came to the U.S.
and tried to get his work on the stage, the plays flopped. It raised pretty
interesting questions about the difference in how theater functions as public
art and how other private art is consumed.

I was surprised by the translation
of Sholem-Aleichem’s works and the invention of the nostalgic idea of the
shtetl in the postwar United States that laid the groundwork for Fiddler.

With the advantage of scholarly
hindsight, one can see specifically how the image was created in this period
for a public living with the major contradictions of postwar America.
Opportunity was available to Jews, [but on the other hand] they were coping
with the devastating news of the Holocaust. The English-language version of a
romantic, idyllic shtetl was created in this period.

And Fiddler itself—there are tons
of surprises in the papers of [director/choreographer] Jerome Robbins. He kept
very extensive notes and some diaries…It was fascinating to find his own
anxious relationship to his Jewish background.

I read biographies of him, but to
actually see in his own handwriting sometimes his disgust at being Jewish and
his desire not to be different, and how that shifts in his work on Fiddler…

And then there are the ways the
show is taken up in other contexts.

Q: You discuss the different
actors who have played the role of Tevye over the years. Which interpretation
do you prefer?

A: It’s really hard to answer
that. I have seen a lot of great Tevyes. I always like the one I just saw the
best, and that would be Scott Wentworth, in Stratford, Ontario.

Q: How different is the play or
movie from the original Sholem-Aleichem stories?

A: There are a lot of things that
are different. As in any adaptation, changes must be made. There are also
changes that have to do with the temperaments of the times.

There are two areas of significant
change. One is that the show doesn’t deal with all the Tevye stories; it
focuses on three of eight or nine. The first Tevye story is not really
represented, and [Fiddler] leaves out the later stories, which get darker and
darker.

He writes over a 20-year period,
and the stories follow the contours of Jewish history. Tevye is a guide to life
in the Jewish Pale. There’s a story of one daughter who drowns herself, and
another daughter who does what her father wants, and the man [she marries] is
an absolute boor, and she’s miserable. She’s left in a horrible, despairing
situation, and Tevye realizes he’s responsible.

Those stories aren’t in the
musical. Even in a show where the first act curtain comes down on a pogrom, and
the second ends with exile, those stories were too dark.

Second, this is a very American
take on the stories. The family comes to the U.S. at the end; that’s not how
Sholem-Aleichem ends his stories. There’s the idea [in the show] that they are
coming to escape persecution and find new lives, so that even with the bleak
ending, there’s a good feeling because we know what’s going to transpire in a
couple of generations.

Q: What’s been the reaction to the
book?

A: It’s only been out a week, but
so far I’m happy to say that it’s been very nicely received. There’s been
friendly feedback from colleagues, and [favorable] e-mails from strangers. I’m
very grateful that [lyricist] Sheldon Harnick admires the book; he wrote a nice
blurb for it. That’s humbling and meaningful.

Q: Are you working on another
book?

A: I’m kicking around a few ideas,
but there’s nothing to report now.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: How much fun it was to work on
this, from beginning to end. I interviewed over 100 people, and every one was
revelatory and enjoyable. People were incredibly generous.

I tried to write it in a narrative
style. It’s not an academic book; it’s a book that tells stories. I tried to
weave the narrative storytelling with the analysis, and I hope the result is
fun to read.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview was conducted in partnership with Moment magazine. For more, please see www.momentmag.com.

A: Of course. I’ve been a fixture
behind the counter. You get a persona based on what you do. I was “Mr. Russ.”
The original Mr. Russ was my grandfather, but I became Mr. Russ.

What should I do in my retirement?
I was around great people and great food—I was back at Russ and Daughters on
the customer side of the counter. It was a great place to retire. Now I watch
the next generation. I consider that success.

Q: Why did you decide to write
this book?

A: I became my persona, Mr. Russ
behind the counter. It’s somewhat infectious; it stays with you. People came in
the store; it feeds your narcissism. I did that for thirty-some-odd years. I
was Mr. Russ, the center of attention; the whole universe revolved around me.
The whole world comes there.

At some point the business was
getting passed on to the next generation: my daughter Niki and my nephew Josh.
I had to teach them how to tell a good piece of fish from a bad one, and how to
tell a good customer from a bad one.

Then it became apparent that the
store was too small for too many big personalities. We Russes have big
personalities. I had to get out of their way. Now there are two new Mr. Russes.

I was a lawyer. You leave it and
say, Thank goodness, free at last. What do I do? I’ll write a book about the
place. I’ll spend the rest of my life doing it. Plenty of writers come into the
store. As a group, they all seemed fairly relaxed. Some even come in in their
pajamas. I said, I can do this! I was ultimately to discover that it was harder
than retail. Who knew?

Then somebody said, Hey, Mark, you
need an agent. I put out the word, and now all these agents were coming around.
Because it turns out that everything is a business, and I had a platform, a
place to sell books, on my counter, on top of the herring. …

So I wrote the book, and it took
me three years. The deadlines forced me to do the book. After 100 times of
reviewing the book, by the 100th time, it’s nauseating. In the
beginning when I put it down on paper, I’m in love with it. Then, the job of
editing—I have a tendency to rattle on—the job was to make it somewhat readable
and not 37 volumes.

By the 100th time of reviewing
it, after the deadline, [I’m thinking], This is the worst piece of crap that
has ever crossed the page! God forbid the Russ family ever reads it! That was
my fear, even though the agent said, I love it!

Then I was praying—I’m not a man
given to prayer—that nobody reviews this book. Then Dwight Garner [from The New
York Times]—he’s not even a Jew—says he loves it. [And after other positive
reviews], to this day, I have no idea why this book I wrote to get out of the
way of the next generation and let them sell lox in peace…It’s a good feeling
for me.

Q: Your book is very funny. Did
you know going into the writing that it would end up with a lot of humor?

A: That’s me. It takes a while to
get the voice down on paper. If I were waiting on you and all you wanted was a
bagel, that would take 45 minutes. I would be interrogating you on your life.
That’s what I did. The idea was to get that sort of schmooze down on the paper.
At the same time, I wanted people to know that I know my business.

Q: What does your family think of
the book?

A: This is in March when the book
comes out. I’m in Florida, visiting my mother, the youngest of the Russ
daughters, age 92, and my aunt, the oldest, age 100.

The book comes in to Random House,
and they send the first two books to my mother and my aunt. I’m watching as
they open it. I’m thinking, I know what they’re going to say. I started running
things by [my mother when I was writing the book, and she would say], “Why’d
you have to say that for? That never happened!”

Both of them were totally
delighted by the book! It’s their story and they like the way it’s told. It
gives them kuved, some honor, for all those years they worked and didn’t get
it. It wasn’t celebrated. From the time they were young girls, they worked hard.

The book is dedicated to them;
it’s probably the best piece of writing [in the book]: “To Hattie, Ida, and
Anne—the Russ Daughters. Without them, there would be no store and no stories.”

[The book] turns out to have been
medicine or a life extender. They hung in there until the book was out, and
their friends were calling them. Now they know I go around the country talking,
and they want to hear what the events were like. How good is that!

Q: Was there anything that
particularly surprised you as you researched the book?

A: It turns out we were Hasidim on
the other side. I’m basically a secular Jew. I go to temple on the High Holy
Days. But we were Hasidim. Grandpa Russ was a Hasid in the old country…when
[he] came here, he left it at Ellis Island….

He sponsored his older brother, Shmemendel,
who comes over and carries on his Hasidic life. One of the great pictures of
the book is of my grandfather and his older brother. Shmemendel is wearing
Hasidic garb, and next to him is my grandfather, wearing a white suit and
wingtip shoes and a fedora….

Q: Are you thinking of writing
another book?

A: In the beginning I didn’t
believe I turned out one book! But since this book has been so well received,
you get that bug. The question is, what would that book be about?

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview was conducted in conjunction with The Lessans Family Annual Book Festival at the JCC of Greater Washington. Mark Russ Federman will be speaking at the festival on Sunday, November 10, at 9:30am.

Q: You write that Stories of Our Lives is a "memoir with a
difference." Why did you decide to blend more traditional aspects of a
memoir with stories and oral narratives?

A: Actually I was asked to contribute to a book by a
folklore grad student who wanted pieces that blended the personal with
folkloric interests. So I came up with what was sort of the first chapter of
the book.

The grad student’s book project never came to fruition (I
think she wandered off from grad school and started a bakery), but the idea of
such a blend stayed with me (plus I had what I had written for the book and
didn’t want to just stick it in a drawer).

So I decided to expand the piece into the book. In doing
that I was partly thinking how amateur genealogists (genealogy is said to be
the most popular indoor American hobby) gave so much attention to their efforts
and so often came up with just a few bare facts like dates and how they could
expand their efforts by recording family and personal stories. And I was partly
thinking of how important a role stories play in preserving family and personal
memory.

I wanted to write a memoir (don’t we all want to record
something of what we’ve done, even if it’s not earth-shattering?) and thought
that as a folklorist (folklorists are very interested in the stories we all
tell) I should do that by trying to call attention to the role of oral
narratives in constructing and reconstructing our pasts.

Q: Was there anything that particularly surprised you as you
examined your family’s past?

A: Not the family narrative; that was in my head and I just
had to bring it out.

But I was surprised at how much documentation to supplement
the stories I could put my hand on. I had letters my father had written my
mother in the 1930s, postcards she’d sent back from Europe in 1926, and–most of
all–I had a wealth of old photographs from the late 19th century to the 1930s
that I could not only use a few of in the book but could use to get a sort of
visual fix on the times I was writing about.

I could actually see my Italian-American grandfather in
uniform with the ethnic organization he belonged to when he first got to
America; I could actually see my mother and her tour group, in the clothing of
the day, in St. Mark’s Square in Venice in the 1920s.

Q: Why did you decide to title the book "Stories of Our
Lives"?

A: Well, it’s about stories in the sense that I’m trying to
call attention to the role of oral narratives. And I felt that it was about
more than me and that other people’s stories had obviously influenced me.

So it wasn’t just my stories but "our" stories and
not just my life but the lives of others whom I’ve interacted with as well.

And I hoped that readers might see a model for coming to
terms with their own stories, hence "our" stories.

Q: Your last chapter deals with Hurricane Katrina. What
impact did that have on your life, and why did you choose it as the subject of
the last chapter of the book?

A: It’s the last chapter because it’s the last major event
in my life. As for its impact, I think that even all these years later people
in New Orleans are still trying to figure out the impact of that event.

In some ways its impact on me was not major. I was in exile
from my home for over two months, but my part of town (the historic Garden
District) did not flood (the older parts of town are evidently on "high
ground," though to look at it, the whole city seems equally flat to me;
obviously there are significant gradations) and snapped back to
"normal" very fast.

Though there are parts of town not far away that still look
devastated, we have a place that looks pretty much as it used to before
Katrina, with functioning businesses, people wandering the streets, tourists
still coming to check us out.

In other ways, the impact has to have been great. I know
that I’m living in a place that’s not the same place it used to be (thousands
of citizens didn’t make it back from wherever they were sent; areas like the
Lower Ninth Ward, once full of life, have acres of open, vacant land where
houses once stood).

I think we’re all
waiting to see what happens now, how this place will continue to develop or if
it will.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m trying to do a book on what American folklorists have
done in and for America. It won’t be for folklore scholars or students but
rather for a general reading audience.

I think that folklorists have done amazing things for
American culture, especially in establishing the "roots" cultures
that make us up and that everybody should know about this.

Q: How did you come up with the characters of the sisters in The View From Penthouse B?

A: I can't say how I came up with Margot, the older sister
who owns the penthouse--she's just one of those characters who appears fully
formed.

Originally, in an earlier draft, she'd taken in three
unrelated roommate-boarders after losing all her money to Madoff, but I wasn't
happy with where that story was going (nowhere).

After my husband died, after a break, it wasn't too big a
leap to start over, in the first person, with the younger, widowed sister
moving in and narrating.

And I gave them a third sister, who didn't live with them,
who could be something of a one-woman Greek chorus and critic.

Q: Do you find writing essays to be a completely different
experience from writing novels, or are there many similarities?

A: It is a completely different experience for me, and
easier, once I find the topic and figure out how to shape it into an essay.

I do think my readers find similarities between my fiction
and nonfiction in the way I see and report things; in "voice" as we
say, and maybe in the balance between sentiment and humor.

I'm learning that the easiest essays are the personal ones,
whereas the ones that are more journalistic and reportorial need a bigger raison
d'etre. I don't want to wonder as I'm writing, "Why am I talking about
this?"

Q: How did you end up writing a book of political tweets?

A: On impulse! There's something like tweet pressure
in the air when you're an author--many examples of Twitter giants like Susan Orlean--so I thought it was time to get on the bus.

After one newsy tweet
to my zero followers, I thought I know! One rhyming political tweet a day until
the 2012 election! I'll enjoy that more than anything. I should've done the
math and realized that meant 499 days… I tweeted the day after the election for
a total of 500 poems, and have posted a few more since, but consider myself
retired from the full-time daily grind.

And the book part of it was just a
wonderful fluke. At a party in Boston (the Grub Street annual conference), the
publisher of Beacon Press asked me, "Someone's doing your tweets as a
book, right?" I said, "Why, no." And she said, "Well,
I am."

Q: Did you get complaints and/or plaudits from readers of
your novels who saw your tweets and were either opposed to or in sync with your
political views?

A: I seem to have left-leaning readers. To my surprise,
hardly any negative feedback on the rhyming tweets. There was the
occasional scold on Facebook, but more along the lines of "Oh, Elinor.
I've enjoyed these so much but this one is in poor taste." I wanted to
write back, "I know! Thank you!" but I didn't...

Q: You’ve been called a modern-day Jane Austen. What do you
think of that comparison?

A: Who could not love such a comparison? When asked what we
might have in common, I supply some answers from Carol Shields's wonderful
Penguin Lives biography of Austen.

She pointed out that "mothers are
essential in her fiction. They are the engines that push the action forward,
even when they fail to establish much in the way of maternal warmth." And
this definitely applies: that the true subject is not current events or ongoing
wars but "the search of an individual for his or her true
home."

Q: Did you like the movie version of Then She Found Me?
Why or why not, and what did you think of all the changes that were made?

A: I loved it. When I read the first few pages of the
screenplay, I thought, huh? Where are my characters?

But as it went forward, I
laughed and I cried. It was smart and funny and touching. And I fully
understood, after some exchanges with Helen Hunt (who wrote, directed, and
starred in it), that she had tried many times to be more faithful to the novel,
but that studios were turning her down.

If cheesy changes had been made to
enlarge or commercialize the story, I may have had a beef, but that was never
the case.

I was happy to represent the film at a few festivals, where I
introduced it and then took questions at the end.

It also brought the
novel back to stores, 18 years after it was first published. When my son (who
was 6 when it was optioned, and 25 at the premiere) met Helen, he put his arm
around my shoulders and said to her, "I hope you know you made my mother's
decade."

Q: Do you think writers are ever satisfied with the
depictions of their characters in movies?

A: Some. I was. I'd been prepped to be realistic,
having received very good advice from novelist Meg Wolitzer when the
manuscript was optioned. She said, "Think of it as a movie based on
characters suggested by the novel Then She Found Me." And
also, a Hemingway quote: You drive to the Nevada border. You throw them the
book and they throw you the money. Then you drive like hell back from where you
came."

As it turned out, my experience was quite wonderful because Helen
Hunt was most thoughtful at every turn.

Q: Were you pleased or disappointed with the substitution of
Colin Firth for the Dwight character in the movie version?

A: Well, let me see: my romantic hero in the book, a geeky
librarian, would have been played by an actor who could win the part of
Ichabod Crane somewhere else. Versus Colin Firth. I'm going to pretend
you didn't ask me that...

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A was conducted in conjunction with The Lessans Family Annual Book Festival at the JCC of Greater Washington. Elinor Lipman will be speaking at the festival on Friday, November 15, at noon. A previous version of this interview was posted on December 11, 2012.

Q: In the introduction to your book, food writer Joan Nathan
discusses how you and your husband come from different food traditions. How were you
able to blend them?

A: By being married for 18 years you just sort of mix and match.
It helps that we are both in the food business and that my husband is a
professional chef. It gives him a natural curiosity towards different culinary
styles and the traditions are intriguing to him.

Q: Your book's title includes the words "new" and
"modern." How are you modernizing Jewish cooking?

A: By employing new techniques to traditional dishes, like
the brisket for example. He weights it down to press it, which gives a great
result.

Q: Why did you decide to divide the recipes seasonally?

A: That's how we live. It’s how we eat and it’s certainly
how our ancestors ate. It’s also how our restaurant is modeled, by the seasons.
It was only natural for our book to do the same. Not to mention the holidays
are very seasonal, as well as their meanings.

Q: Do you have a favorite recipe from the book?

A: I love the Cauliflower with Golden Raisins. It’s a side
dish but everyone who makes it loves its simplicity and blending of flavors. I
also love the take on stuffed derma. We made it vegan. It’s awesome - a little
tricky to make but awesome.

Q: Are you working on another cookbook?

A: I have several ideas in mind, but I haven't spoken to my
agent yet - I want to make sure these sell well!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: The photographer, Renee Comet, is truly amazing. The
photographs are my favorite part of the book - she captured the essence so
well!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview was conducted in conjunction with The Lessans Family Annual Book Festival at the JCC of Greater Washington. Ellen Kassoff Gray and Todd Gray will be speaking at the festival on Sunday, November 17, at 1:30pm.

Q: How did you come up with the concept for this novel, and
for telling the story in three different time periods?

A: My previous novel was about Jewish spies during the Civil
War, and people sometimes showed up at my readings in costume. I developed a
bit of musket burnout, and I decided I would write a completely contemporary
novel this time around.

I started writing a story about a woman who creates a
software app that records everything its users do, and about her acrimonious
relationship with her envious sister. But that app—which promises to eliminate
the need for personal memory—also becomes a kind of character in the novel,
almost like a child of its creator. And like the actual child of its creator,
it goes off the rails and disappoints its creator by not being quite what she
had hoped for.

The creator’s sister, meanwhile, exploits her pride and weaknesses
to usurp her life, and by the end of the novel the reader’s sympathies have
tipped so much that it is no longer clear who is the “good” sister or who is
the “bad” sister, or whose version of the past is the most true.

But soon I saw that I was writing a book about memory—and
not merely about memory, but about the difference between how we remember
things and how those things actually occurred, and the profound ways that that
difference influences our lives and our choices. I needed to test those ideas
about memory against something more consequential than merely one person’s
childhood.

That’s when I began to work my way back in time to an
earlier form of data-dumping: the Cairo Genizah, a medieval stash of 190,000 manuscripts
that could resurrect an entire thousand-year-old community, if anyone would
bother to read through it.

The Genizah is the medieval Facebook, and that
opened up the question of data storage then and now, what we save and why we
save it. Later the book tests even that layer of memories by going back into
the time of the medieval people who created it. And of course nothing is as it
seems.

Q: You note that your husband encouraged you to work on a modern retelling of
the Joseph story. Was it something that took a long time to write, or did it
come together fairly easily?

A: Nothing comes easily in writing a novel. Like my other
novels, this one started with about a hundred pages that I threw away. I then
started working on something about two women who worked together, and how envy
was altering their lives in ways they could never have anticipated. My husband
suggested the Joseph idea at that point, and I made these women sisters—which
of course changed everything.

Q: Sibling relationships play a major role in the book, especially the dynamic
between Josie and Judith. How would you describe their relationship, especially
compared with those of the other sets of siblings in the novel?

A: There are several sets of siblings in the novel (actually
even more than there appear to be, but explaining that would mean revealing a
few key plot points at the book’s end), and they each illustrate that braid of
love, loyalty and envy.

In most of the sibling pairs, one is more successful than
the other (whether financially or in terms of esteem), and that unfair
imbalance of success and failure is one that haunts a relationship where two
people have presumably started their lives with all the same possibilities.

I’ve always been interested in the biblical Joseph story,
because Joseph is truly talented but also truly arrogant, and his brothers are
truly cruel but also truly aware of a genuine injustice, and the human emotions
in the story are so raw and real.

But what’s most amazing about that story to me is that
everything in it appears to be foretold (through Joseph’s undeniably prophetic
dreams)—and yet everything in it also appears to happen entirely through human
agency. You can’t read the story without appreciating the interlocking presence
of both free will and destiny.

That dynamic of free will versus fate seems embedded, to me,
in everything in our lives—not necessarily from a religious point of view, but
from a secular one. Religious people may believe in predestination through God,
but secular people may believe in predestination through genetics, brain
chemistry, laws of evolution.

The question of free will and destiny is also embedded in
the nature-versus-nurture debate, which makes the relationships between
siblings an amazing way to explore this question of how much responsibility we
have for who we are.

Q: Can you explain more about the role of memory in the book?

A: The book questions whether or not there is such a thing
as an objective reflection on the past. Our lives are now so saturated with
digital recording that it’s possible to imagine that we can look back at the
past with more evidence than we ever had.

My main character exploits that technological ability to
create a complete system that records every aspect of our lives. It’s a fantasy
I’ve had for a long time. But now, of course, social media has turned my dream
into a nightmare where every idiotic thing you do is recorded forever.

In the novel, that question of how we remember the past is
turned on its head, as historical evidence, whether digital or otherwise, ends
up interfering with the way we actually control our past—not by recording
everything, but by curating our memories, by selecting, out of that bottomless
well of trivialities, what’s worth remembering.

And it’s that act of choosing
what’s worth remembering that turns a lifetime’s worth of memories into a story
that gives our lives meaning.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Did I mention how I always start with a hundred pages I end
up throwing away?

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I have an 8 year old, a 6 year old, a 4 year old, and a 1
year old—which means this is all the time I can give to this interview right
now. Thanks for understanding.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).